The Tidy Writer

Writing’s a great tidier. When I sit down to write, I find that my room gets cleaned from top to bottom, my papers get sorted and filed, and every pin and paper clip gets carefully put in its place. I refuse to even think about writing until everything is in order. In fact, so thorough am I that sometimes I run out of time and write nothing at all!

With such a powerful influence acting upon me at the commencement of each literary effort, I simply do not understand why other writers, I am told, often find their desks heaped to overflowing with books, papers, clippings and such, when my desk is so neat. How could they find anything in such a clutter? How can they find any place to write? I, on the other hand, know exactly where each item is: my pen, my blank page, and my coffee cup. It’s all I need, and I have plenty of my vital “writer’s space.”

Of course, other writers might have to accomodate the sheer bulk of many notes and manuscripts, readers’ correspondence, publishers’ contracts, royalty checks and such; and I suppose no author can avoid the vanity of having a copy or two of his published books lying about.

But thank goodness I’ve avoided anything of the kind. I have carefully erased any hint of literary enterprise going on in my room, and I’ve bound and secreted my entire ouvre of journal notes safely away, far under my desk where no one is likely to notice, along with a mere single copy of my handful of published stories and poems. Even Emily Dickinson, with her small tattered sheets of poems, couldn’t outdo me for squirreling our works safely away.

Thus, I have utterly escaped the untidiness of authorship which has claimed so many of my fellows! and my thoughts are likely not to attract any nosey, curious eyes in my lifetime.